This year Portland Opera is creating a small, intimate theater at our Portland Opera Plaza where you'll have the chance to experience opera . . . up close and personal! With less than 200 seats, you'll literally be within feet of the performers. And those performers will be something special indeed-all participants in our new Young Artists Program which will feature some of the best young talent to come from the nation's finest vocal schools.

We guarantee you an extraordinary opera experience!

Written for exactly this kind of intimate setting, Benjamin Britten's chamber opera is anything but small. When Rome's powerful generals speculate on the fidelity of their wives left at home, only one of those wives-Lucretia-proves faithful. And for a chasteness that should be rewarded, she is instead brutalized by the ruthless Tarquinius. This tragic event provides Britten the perfect situation to explore some of his favorite themes-mankind's violent impulses, the destruction of beauty, and the loss of innocence.

Britten finds the perfect situation to explore some of his favorite themes - humanity's penchant for violence and the loss of innocence.